In my last post, I suggested that to “conceptualize” is to construe a thing as an object. But this, I’m fully aware, is only likely to be informative to people who can imagine various things differently construed, sometimes as objects of one kind, sometimes as objects of another, and sometimes, perhaps, not as objects at all. That is, it will only work for people who define “thing” and “object” in ways that lets them distinguish between them. In this post, I want to provide those definitions. Readers who are familiar with the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein will perhaps notice that my definitions are inspired by his early work in the Tractatus. There’s also a little of Heidegger’s phenomenology in my approach, but I’m by no means trying to do their thinking justice, nor am I committed to any particular metaphysics. I just find it useful to distinguish between ways of looking at things, and I have found that this also sometimes helps authors think about what they are doing when they are writing about their research. As will become clear, the trick here is to understand how things participate in facts and by this means to establish a certain “objectivity” in our writing.

Everything is a thing and every thing is what it is. To say that some particular thing exists isn’t to say very much about it, though it does distinguish it from things that don’t. But ask yourself a deceptively simple question, “How many things are in your vicinity right now?” There’s a keyboard, a computer screen, a mouse, a telephone, a coffee cup, a pen holder, and a pad of paper in front me. There’s also a desk here, a small receipt printer, and I’m sitting on a chair. I suppose the floor is a thing in my vicinity, as is the lamp above me. That’s about a dozen things. But let’s look closer. There are three pens in the pen holder and 104 keys on the keyboard. The phone has a base and a receiver; the screen has a case; the chair has five wheels. It begins to look as though there are, literally, countless things around me. Exactly how many things there are will depend on how you count or, more precisely, what you count as a “thing”. If you don’t care what you are counting there is no way to know when to stop. Even our sense of “in the vicinity” is unclear here: how far away from me does a thing have to be before it no longer counts as one of the things around me? It all depends on how you look at it. I guess we might call the situation “subjective”.

We solve this problem by construing the things in my vicinity as objects of a particular kind. When I was writing the above paragraph, I was standing at the service counter in the library, so some of the things around me were necessary to my work and others not so much. The phone might ring and it would be my job to answer it. A student might walk up to the counter and ask me a question, which it would be my job to answer. I might have to use the mouse, keyboard and screen to help them find what they were looking for. The pens, too, were there for me and others to use if we needed them. That is, some of the things around me afforded me possible courses of action and others made it impossible (or at least unlikely) that particular events would happen. So I could objectify these things as equipment and understand them as useful or useless to me. As equipment, I need the surface of my desk to be clean and tidy, and the computer to be on, and I need to be logged into it. The wheels of the chair stick a little, which annoys me. These interests indicate possibilities, things that could be otherwise. An object is really a thing construed such that we know how it could be different; it’s a thing situated in a space of possibility.

When things are arranged in objective ways they constitute facts. (Note that, as I’ve been defining it, an “objective” reality is really just one of many possible ways of engaging with my environment.) For most of my shift, for example, the lights were on and working fine. But there was a brief moment when an electrician cut the power to the lights overhead. It was a fact that the lights were on and then it was a fact that they were off. And then it was a fact that they were on again. All along, the lamp was the sort of thing (an object) that could be on or off, shedding light on the other things around me. And the black surface of the desk is “objectively” black precisely because it absorbs the light that we shine on it. The white piece of paper that is lying on the surface does the opposite. This is what makes the blue ink (a little lighter than black but a lot darker than white) of the pen so useful when we want to note a book classification so we can go and find it on the shelf. The book could be anywhere (it is possible that it has been misplaced) but it is very likely that it was put back properly and we’ll find it where it’s supposed to be — where “in fact” it is.

I’ve been considering the trivial example of me standing at the service counter during a shift in the library. But not long ago I was doing the same thing in a much less trivial way. We had a researcher visiting who was doing an ethnography of everyday life in the library. She was observing the things it contains and the people who use it, construing them as objects of various kinds, as loci of possibilities that she could then analyze as facts. She would have been “objectifying” me and everything around me. There’s no harm in that and, indeed, there’s no way around it. All things are also objects (in countless ways) and everything that exists participates in (countless) facts. There is no isolated thing. There are no purely objective relations (without things or facts to realize them), which is merely to say that facts realize (make real) particular possibilities and leave others for another time (sometimes, forever). The purpose of distinguishing between things, objects and facts is to organize our stream of consciousness according to our concepts, to let the theories we have make sense of what is happening in the situations we study. Things just are what they are. But we know them as objects when they join up up with other things to form facts.

Last week, a collaborator and I gave our students (hello, students!) 72 hours to write a five-paragraph essay (hello, John!). Officially, the students had been given a 3-page limit (6825 characters including spaces), which was to include their reference list. That gave them about 1000 words of prose to write. They have been taught to think of their writing as a series of paragraphs, each of which supports, elaborates or defends one thing they know in at least six sentences and at most two-hundred words. They know these are just ball-park figures that chalk out a playing field, and that their real task, in this case, is to construct a five-minute reading experience for their peers, which is to say, for their fellow students. They were to present what they know for the purpose of discussing it with other knowledgeable people — each other. They were given a podcast to listen to and told to draw on the theories we were studying in the course to “conceptualize, analyze and discuss” it. As I prepare to read their essays this week, I thought I’d say a few words (or, indeed, five paragraphs) about what we meant by that.

To conceptualize something is to subsume it under a concept. Less tautologically (if perhaps only slightly less so), to conceptualize is to conceive of a thing as an object. Everyday life is full of “things”, which can be seen, heard, touched, smelled, and tasted. We can pick them up, run them into things (and people), buy them, sell them, steal them, break and fix them. When we conceptualize them (which, you’ll note, is just another thing to do with things) we prepare ourselves to think about them objectively. Consider electric scooters, for example. You can, indeed, buy, sell, steal, or rent these things for your own subjective profit or pleasure. But you can also think about them more dispassionately — as, say, “innovations”. To conceptualize an electric scooter as an innovation is to introduce concepts like technology, opportunity, and life-cycle in ways that let you see possibilities (like R&D, ascent, maturity, and decline) that are not visible without those concepts. Note, by contrast, that an engineer might conceptualize the scooter in very different terms, as a “vehicle” perhaps, which might be fast or slow, efficient or wasteful. It’s the same thing but a different object, subsumed under a different concept (or set of concepts), focusing attention on altogether different possibilities.

Once you have constructed your object (conceptualized your thing) and situated it in a space of possibilities, you are ready to analyze it. This means figuring out, not what is possible by virtue of its being an innovation, but what is actually going on with it as such. If all innovations can be located somewhere on the S-curve of the technology life-cycle, for example, then (simplifying somewhat) electric scooters, or a particular brand of electric scooter, are either in the R&D, ascent, maturity or decline phase. Well, what is it? Once you have decided what the truth is, you must also decide how to tell your reader about it, and here it is important to keep mind that when you conceptualized your object you activated your reader’s expectations of it. Engineers and entrepreneurs expect totally different things of electric scooters, so when you told your reader to think of them as “innovations” your reader (being familiar with the scholarship on entrepreneurship) immediately expected your analysis to show certain things. And here’s the twist: an analysis is always the artful disappointment of your reader’s expectations of the object. You want to challenge your reader’s expectations; indeed, your reader expects to be disappointed. They want to be challenged to go beyond the terms of the theory they already have. They want to learn something from your analysis that they didn’t already know.

A disappointment, no matter how expected, no matter how accepted, has to have consequences. And your discussion is all about what those consequences are. Since you have now identified an interesting tension between the concepts of your theory and the object of your analysis, the reader will want to know what you are going to do about it, or what you think someone else (perhaps the reader) should do about it. This could involve modifications to the theory, i.e., some tweaking of the concepts that you subsumed the object under in the first place. We might say you merely tried to subsume the object under a concept and you weren’t entirely successful. The concept, it turned out, couldn’t fully capture the nuances of innovation in electric scooters and improvements to the concept must now be made. (Before you assert your humility, remember that these are merely improvements to your understanding of the theory at the level of the course you’re taking.) Conversely, you can insist that there’s nothing wrong with the theory and the failure is all in the object. If an electric scooter lacks the maturity that befits its station on life’s way, let’s say, your advice is that it grow up. You are proposing entirely practical consequences, which will bring the thing you’re studying into alignment with the theory you share with your reader. You are, of course, willing to discuss it.

Obviously, given the terms of the assignment, one solution would be to spend a paragraph doing each of these things, just as I’ve devoted a single paragraph each to the tasks of conceptualizing, analyzing and discussing innovations. But, as I made clear to my students even as I presented this “easy” solution to them, you can get the conceptualization out of the way in two or three sentences in the introduction. This means you’ll be making some serious assumptions about the theoretical competence of your reader but not necessarily unreasonable ones. (I stress again that the reader is an intellectual equal.) You might also leave your discussion entirely to the last three or four sentences of your conclusion, gesturing to implications that your reader, you assume, will understand the significance and relevance of without further elaboration. That leaves you with three paragraphs in the middle to do a detailed analysis of the object, and in some cases that might be the best way to bring about the artful disappointment you seek in the mind of your reader. Or you might come up with some other way to organize your essay. The important thing is to get your reader to expect something, to challenge those expectations, and to talk your way out the trouble you have thereby caused, all within five minutes (1000 words). With the right reader in mind, a few hours spread over a few days is all you need.